HTML or HyperText
Markup Language is the main markup language for
creating web pages and other information that
can be displayed in a web browser.
HTML is written in the
form of HTML elements consisting of tags
enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within
the web page content. HTML tags most commonly
come in pairs like <h1> and </h1>, although some
tags represent empty elements and so are
unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a
pair is the start tag, and the second tag is the
end tag (they are also called opening tags and
closing tags). In between these tags web
designers can add text, further tags, comments
and other types of text-based content.
The purpose of a web
browser is to read HTML documents and compose
them into visible or audible web pages. The
browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses
the tags to interpret the content of the page.
HTML elements form the
building blocks of all websites. HTML allows
images and objects to be embedded and can be
used to create interactive forms. It provides a
means to create structured documents by denoting
structural semantics for text such as headings,
paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other
items. It can embed scriptswritten in languages
such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of
HTML web pages.
Web browsers can also refer to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the look and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML.
